Gold

An artist and teacher from a family of artists and teachers, Dr. Heather McCune Bruhn started her academic career intending to become a painter. After receiving undergraduate degrees in Art History and Silkscreen Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University, she came to Penn State for her MA and PhD (2006) in Art History.

Her specialty is late Medieval goldsmithwork from Germany, a topic that she researched as a Fulbright grantee for one year in Cologne, Germany. This research helped to spark her interest in artistic technique, the meaning and function of works of art, the economics of art, and broader issues of historical and cultural context.

Sarah J. Townsend is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Penn State-University Park, where she teaches courses such as Amazonia and Extractivism, Luso-Brazilian Theater Workshop, Latin American Modernisms and (Old) New Media, and Through the Looking-Glass: Race in the U.S. and Brazil. In broad terms, her work deals with the connections among culture, politics, and economics from the late nineteenth century to the present, a dynamic she most often explores through a focus on theater and/or other media technologies in Latin America. She is the co-editor of Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (2008) and the author of The Unfinished Art of Theater: Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil (2018).